Mr Frankenstein

by Richard Freeborn

  ‘Andy’ll be here if Uncle Ben comes back, that’s all.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ She came across towards the bed. ‘Oh, you’ve got nothing on!’

  ‘True,’ he admitted, drawing the sheet over his bare shoulders.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I didn’t know I would be staying the night. I didn’t have anything to wear.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s nice to see you again, Dolly.’

  ‘I must go to school.’ She made a face. ‘Andy’ll be all right, won’t he?’

  ‘Andy will be perfectly all right.’

  She ran out of the room. It was cursory. The little encounter set the tone for all the other encounters during his brief stay in what Gloria Billington had called her fortress. The general atmosphere, he soon realized, was businesslike and efficient, but essentially impersonal. He was glad of this up to a point. It meant little was demanded of him socially except a readiness to follow a set routine of meals served in a dining room overlooking terraces of lawn facing downwards towards woodland. He ate a late breakfast alone. His hostess and her confidante, Julie Schiff, were absent on ‘important business’, so the ubiquitous Peter unsmilingly told him. He could not quite get the measure of this man. Polite but stiff, rather military in his bearing, with a thin, tight-featured face, grey eyes that rarely blinked and quite sharp lines round his mouth as if drawn there by a fine-edged charcoal, he looked and behaved exactly like a very efficient policeman. If he never addressed Joe as ‘sir’, he just as formally appeared to answer questions only if they deserved a negative. No outward calls on his smartphone were possible; no contact with the outside world without ‘Mrs Billington’s’ explicit permission. So he could not call Jenny, nor his mother, nor could he even call his Wimbledon home. He resented all this but resigned himself to it out of sheer fatigue and the hope of earning a little more time to recover from the previous day’s injuries.

  Towards evening that day, sitting in the same room and dozing in front of a TV game show, he heard a patter of feet. Dolly came running in. He assumed this meant that her mother had returned from whatever had caused her daylong absence. Before he could ask her, Dolly started her own interrogation.

  ‘Are you really going?’

  ‘Am I going where?’

  ‘Are you going to see Uncle Ben?’

  ‘Well, probably. I don’t know for sure.’

  ‘Mummy says you are.’

  ‘In that case, I am.’

  ‘Mummy’s in love with Uncle Ben.’

  ‘I’m very glad she’s in love with…’

  ‘And I’m in love with him.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re…’

  ‘So if you’re really going to see Uncle Ben?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When you see him, will you tell him that?’

  ‘That you love him? Of course I will!’

  ‘Oh, I love you!’ she cried. Quite unselfconsciously she flung her arms round his shoulders and hugged him. ‘I really do love you!’

  ******

  Julie Schiff smiled a smile as perfect as a water lily by Claude Monet. It had both the impasto look of depth to it and the fresh, lipsticked surface gleam. Although she aimed to sustain a college-girl brightness in her manner, being older she layered it with the slightly arch sophistication of a girl who knew she looked good and traded on it. Her face was attractively square, with fairly broad cheekbones and a well-shaped mouth cleaving at the edges into pretty dimples. Her eyes seemed beneath their straight brows to have a fierce clarity and directness, as if she were immediately totting up the sexual ratings and possible IQ of whoever met her gaze. In any case, the crisp natural fullness of her blond hair totted up the sum of her own attractions. She quickly patted it as she gave a little wriggle in the seat beside him.

  He had to shake himself into consciousness. Just short of three o’clock Southern California time, so it was announced, and the descent into Los Angeles was beginning. Unresisting, he yawned at her smile.

  ‘You okay?’

  The flight from London Heathrow was preparing to make its descent into Los Angeles international airport. A soft ding-dong before the announcement had roused him from a dream of Ben, whose face had looked at him with eyes like holes burnt through paper. He had wanted to ask him why he’d suddenly flown to LA. He had wanted to ask him what the hell the letters had been all about. But they were so many burnt wisps now, fragments blown into his consciousness as he descended through bright air. He found he could only catch one or two at best, like poor Ronald Salisbury’s damaged face and his mother’s eyes staring down from the portrait and Jenny looking at him and telling him not to and, far worse, the realization that his Frankenstein role had helped create someone called Ben whose drunken voice kept on saying so strangely and inexplicably:

  ‘It is the Son of God! The Son of God is now risen from the dead to speak to us about the Father!’

  It was madness and he knew it. Ben had said dozens of strange things, but this, he supposed, was just about the strangest. Much stranger than the look in the technicolor-perfect, immaculately blue and sparkling eyes of Julie Schiff now studying him so closely that, in evasive reaction, he turned and stared out at the vast radiant blue of the Californian sky.

  ‘Come on, Joe, get real.’

  She shook his arm in a lightly reproachful way at his failure to be attentive, released it and settled back into her seat. After a while she said, doing up her seatbelt with a flourish:

  ‘Now to business. You’ll be meeting your contact over here, that’s all been arranged.’

  ‘What contact?’

  ‘The one who’ll take you to Martha.’

  ‘Won’t you?’

  ‘No, she doesn’t want to have me there.’

  This astonished him. Since she had had charge of his passport, the visas, the tickets, he supposed she would at least be taking him to see Martha.

  ‘Why doesn’t she want you there?’

  Julie licked her lips. ‘Gloria’s my employer now and that, er, means I kinda act for her here in LA. But Martha still gives the orders. She deals with me only if I’m, you know, really kosher, really working for the firm. She understands that. So…’ She raised an eyebrow and gave a shrug. ‘Well, we also know you’ve got something with you, so we gotta be nice to you, haven’t we? Like I’ve been nice to your friend. I fixed the visa and things for him.’ She was talking, he realized, about Ben. ‘I can do things, you see. That’s 95% of what this trip’s all about!’

  In the present state of his knowledge that could simply be reduced to one thing: he was flying to Los Angeles to see Martha. Whether or not he was doing this courtesy of Julie Schiff and the CIA, as she must have done it for Ben, he could not be sure. He could only be sure that he carried with him something of importance.

  ‘We’ve arranged a nice place. You’ll love it.’

  ‘You’ll thank the firm, won’t you?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For the trip, the hospitality. I’d have afforded it on my own, you know, but maybe not quite as soon as this. I come to see my mother every couple of months.’

  ‘Sure. Gloria told me. But now you’re an honoured guest.’

  He knew that wasn’t true. He was more likely to find himself shunted into some corner of ‘a nice place’ by whatever the powers were that now appeared to have taken charge of his life. The very unexpected challenge of Julie Schiff’s charm excited him and simultaneously made him extremely wary. Even the brightness of it seemed quite artless in its self-serving purpose. He was playing along, that’s all. He would keep faith with his monster and hopefully bring back Uncle Ben. That was, for him, the sole comforting purpose of this visit if he were to do what Gloria Billington wanted, but for purely personal reasons he wanted only to see his mother. He would only contemplate that when there was actual proof, it seemed, of his own identity and that proof depended on the hard woman referred to only as Martha.

&nbs
p; ‘I get so frightened during landings,’ Julie Schiff confided suddenly. ‘Please, Joe, can I hold your hand?’

  She held firmly onto his left wrist as they began the descent into Los Angeles international airport. A glimpse of white freeways dotted with tiny vehicles, palm trees, roofs, sea glitter and they were touching down. At the first opening of the aircraft doors the Los Angeles heat entered as though someone had pushed a hot stove into the cabin. They went along air-conditioned walkways, were wafted through Immigration and Customs by some abracadabra, it seemed, of Julie’s doing only to find a young black uniformed chauffeur waiting for them in the foyer holding a sign marked Schiff who then showed them into the late-afternoon gleaming heat of the parking lot. A distant violet horizon indicated the smog. High up the tall palms were going rustle-rustle against a clear cerulean blue. All around car bodies shone like precious stones and moved in grave hissing procession over tarmac and concrete. Civilisation momentarily seemed to have moved on beyond physical effort into some pretend or almost real transcendence.

  They were shown to an air-conditioned car. Julie said very little. Perhaps she was really as tired as he was. In any case, the cool of the car’s interior and its motion as they followed lines of vehicles into the freeway induced silence rather than talk. Then, when they joined the pounding traffic along the San Diego freeway going northwards, it had an indefatigable urgency that seemed to enact in reality the metaphor of life as a rat race.

  ‘Miss Schiff,’ said the black chauffeur, speaking at the rear-view mirror, ‘you know our Santa Monica house?’

  ‘I’ve been told it’s real nice.’

  ‘It’s one neat place.’

  ‘Is that so.’

  ‘One neat place.’ A pause. ‘Right by the ocean.’

  ‘Sounds real neat.’

  ‘Sure is.’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ said Julie Schiff, as if with that brief exchange she had been admitted into a new sorority. She had suddenly renewed her customary, bright Joan of Arc look. A mission was in preparation, Joe supposed.

  At which point he thought of the early morning drive to London, the return of the parental car to its Wimbledon home, the collecting of clothes, passport, etc., the dash to Heathrow and the sense of time as a vanished element enclosing his life. That all seemed to have happened not the same day but the day before yesterday or the day before that in a remote time as fragmentary as his smashed wristwatch or as distant as Jenny’s absence in New York had been. But now he had surrendered himself to the inevitability of the arrangement with Gloria Billington, implemented, of course, by Julie Schiff and somehow connected with his identity. Just as he knew, if he were going to Santa Monica, he would not be far from his mother. Was that where he was being taken?

  He gazed at the boulevards and houses and palm trees, all continually opening fanwise to him as he sped along the freeway, and he tried to see it with Jenny’s eyes or his mother’s as something familiar; but he couldn’t. What he saw was strange. Equally strange was the fact that Julie was beside him, not Jenny.

  He saw a world recognisable as smartly suburban metropolitan where summer people gazed in store windows or strolled on sidewalks and houses had bright green stretches of lawn on which sprinklers played like silver fireworks. Girls had a burnished, oiled look in their beach outfits, boys looked baroquely macho with their thick bronzed thighs and skin-tight garments.

  ‘Here’s San Vicente.’

  The driver swept them onto San Vicente Boulevard and then turned oceanwards. The car entered a parking area surrounded by high walls. Emerging from the coolness of the car’s interior, Joe felt both the furnace mouth of the heat and a man’s hands expertly frisking him. He knew the locket on a small chain round his neck would be found. Gloria Billington had spent the whole of the previous day, she said, having it made for him. A pair of exceedingly dark lenses subjected it to intent scrutiny out of sandy masculine features. The locket was fingered, the lid sprang open, the face of Dolly Billington revealed.

  ‘Yours?’

  ‘It’s…’ It had been delivered to him by courier just before he boarded the aircraft. ‘It’s my niece,’ Joe lied.

  Wordlessly the lid was closed. Equally silently his luggage was searched very carefully. Then he and Julie were carried by elevator up three floors to a wide patio overlooking a swimming pool. Two motel-style rooms were provided, with sliding doors opening directly onto the patio. Soft music came from a buffet area to one side. They were offered drinks.

  Julie nudged him. ‘See!’

  The whisper was urgent and salacious. He could not be sure what she meant. Then he realized her whisperings directed him to take note of two young men of immaculate athletic physique, one dark-haired, one fair, who could be seen frolicking at the far end of the pool and seemed so fondly absorbed by each other that he could hardly imagine they were lifeguards. With an air of ownership she claimed all the people there were employees of the firm.

  ‘They’re ours!’ she confided.

  He yawned at the news. Irritated by his seeming indifference, she pushed a plastic straw down hard into the ice of her tall frosted glass of Coca Cola and announced she was going to shower. He leaned across the table before she rose.

  ‘Julie, please tell me why we’re here. We arrive here, sit at this table, watch these two fooling about in the water and yawn at each other. When do I meet this contact you talked about?’

  ‘There’s plenty of time, plenty of time.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘It’s not till tomorrow.’

  ‘You mean, I am to meet the contact tomorrow?’

  ‘I’ll have to check.’

  ‘So you’re not sure?’

  ‘As I say, I’ll have to check. We deserve a rest now. We’ll talk this evening, right?’

  He saw she was not going to be stopped from taking her shower. Watching her walk away over the blue tiles of the patio, he found the sway of her hips made doubly sensuous by the tight crumpled wrinkling of her skirt. The backs of her elegant legs simultaneously flashed invitations as enticing as blown kisses. Closing the sliding doors of her room, she gave him a flutter of her fingers and then disappeared.

  He recognised that his body clock was beginning to tell him something. Perhaps he was caught in a Jenny/ Julie identity crisis. Times had changed, he thought, and he was growing forgetful. Wandering over to the buffet or cafeteria or whatever it was, he found a solitary barman, the one who had served them on the patio. He said he wanted to make a call to his mother. The man smiled an elastic-lipped, exuberantly warm smile.

  ‘No way, sir.’ Nodding towards the pool, he went on buffing up glasses with a napkin. ‘Calls in, sir, sure. No calls out.’

  What the nod meant became obvious at once. The fair-haired member of the athletic duo, his hair streaking over his face and his body gleaming wet, approached along the poolside.

  ‘Mister, it’s best you don’t ask questions like that.’

  The young man’s thin, handsome features with their suntanned, fresh-rinsed look and the liquid, shining, mahogany tint of the eyes backed up the statement as if the very request impugned the honour of Gotham City P.D.

  ‘So what am I supposed to do? If I want to call England…’

  ‘We’re just here to protect you, mister.’

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘That’s our instructions.’

  ‘What is this place then?’

  ‘It’s a safe house. You’re safe here. We’re here to protect you and the lady.’ The young man spoke out of the side of his mouth as if he had chewed the words and now released them in a steady drawl.

  ‘Thank you. So I’m protected but I’m stuck here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The dark-haired bodyguard lurked close at hand, leaning against the wall. He now sloped forward and said laconically:

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  As they were both about to slope away, Joe detained them by asking:

  ‘So what’s t
here to do round here?’

  The fair-haired one shrugged. ‘You can order a drink, have something to eat, use the pool, watch what’s on TV, go to bed.’ The recital suggested all of human life was there.

  ‘But I can’t leave?’

  ‘No way. Not with our present instructions.’

  ‘I’m a prisoner.’

  ‘No, mister, you’re a guest. A guest of the firm.’

  ‘But I can’t use a phone, I can’t call up someone in London?’

  ‘No. If you do, it just won’t, you know…’

  He raised one hand languidly with a circular motion. It was a graphic enough demonstration of his meaning. The realization made it easier not to exercise will-power or judgement, let alone raise objections. He said thank you. The dark-haired one said: ‘You’re welcome.’

  For the first time a mild on-shore breeze could be felt on the patio. It came from the ocean that was still a glittering blue beyond the shielding tropical greenery. Tiny waves moved across the surface of the pool. Nothing overlooked the place except half-a-dozen tall palms and what appeared to be acacias and jacarandas stretching above the red pantile roof of the motel-style buildings.

  Joe found himself alone. To test the security of this tender trap, he tried some of the other sliding doors facing the pool and found them locked. Only Julie’s door moved. As soon as he slid it slightly he heard the noise of a shower running. There was someone else in there. He was certain. It was confirmed by the sight of a figure in silhouette. He sprang away, leaving the sliding door slightly open, turned to see if he had been observed, noticed CCTV installations on the walls that were higher than he supposed and saw wires running along the pantiles surmounting them.

  So that was it! No doubt he had been observed, but it was equally obvious to him that both he and Julie were not only confined by this tender trap, they were more likely to be treated as prisoners than guests. When the chance arose, their clothes would be searched, their luggage expertly dismantled. It would all be done in the name of hospitality and security. So be it.

  He slid back the door to his own room and found it filled with a pearly light. It illumined his intentions. He would make sure he was right. Glancing behind him, the slanting sunlight made the pool look as enticing as an oasis to a parched traveller. It was no mirage, though. He would test its reality by stripping and ensuring his clothes were laid carefully on top of each other in such a way that he would know at once if they had been moved. Finding his swimming briefs, he slipped into the water.